Once you have decided whether you are going to run a peer review group with real cases from your practice to discuss, or if you would like to run a peer discussion with pre-prepared cases such as those provided by ABDO, you’re ready to set your group and session online.

GOC registrants do not have to rely on CET providers to supply interactive CET in a convenient location. You can set up a peer preview or peer discussion group when it is convenient for a group to get together, provided you are in an appropriate setting, like and optical practice, prepare properly and give enough notice for it to be GOC-approved. All members of the group can gain 3 interactive CET points.

If you are planning to run a peer review you will need to consider which competency areas your cases will cover and what the learning objectives of the session are. It is worth making a note of these before you start creating your session online.

Provide copies of the anonymised records for each member of the discussion group to take away and reflect upon

Make notes about the discussion whilst it progresses

Ensure the discussion moves on to include several cases over the session

Ensure the discussion lasts for approximately 2 hours (the absolute minimum time allowance from the GOC is 1 hour)

Ensure each member of the group takes part in the discussion

Make the CET Declaration on the GOC website after the event

Upload the points for each participant to their GOC number and surname

It is not the task of the group leader/facilitator to teach or criticise the opinions of any member of the group. You should stimulate discussion by drawing attention to the points on the records which are linked with the session approved learning objectives.

Please note the GOC require 10 working days to process approvals for requested CET sessions. Please ensure you allow plenty of time before your planned session date as approval will not be provided post event.

Getting started

Log in to My CET on the GOC website

Click ‘Peer Review’ on the top menu and click on ‘I’m ready to set up my group’.

Please remember to save to press save as you work through the pages so you don’t lose any of your work.

The Group Leader fields will be automatically filled with your details. Enter the venue, date and time of your planned event.

Complete the requested details about your group and the broad topics of discussion.

Learning objectives

Enter the target group, this is the role of the professionals who will be at your session. It may be that you have a mixed group of dispensing opticians/contact lens opticians/optometrists. It may be that the learning objectives are the same for each target group but in some competency areas they may need to be different and specific to each professional role.

Remember, to gain CET points from the discussion each group member will need to be in the target groups that you enter learning objectives for. For example, if your target groups are dispensing opticians and contact lens opticians, if an Optometrist attended your discussion they would not be eligible to obtain CET points.

Enter the learning objectives in the same way they are laid out in the GOC competency framework documents, with the ‘indicators’ as the proposed learning objective. There may be more than one indicator for each performance criteria, select the indicator which best describes your proposed case discussion.

The GOC will send you an automated email to confirm your application. If there are any queries a GOC CET approver will contact you to ask for clarification or additional information. Otherwise you will receive an approval notification in approximately 10 working days.

If you are setting up a peer discussion and using the ABDO pre-prepared cases, the provided learning objectives have the GOC performance criteria number alongside the learning objective. You will need to add all of the provided learning objectives to discuss the cases in the booklets.

Once you have entered and saved all your learning objectives click ‘Next’. You will be taken to a summary page. If you are a happy with all the information, click ‘Submit my application for approval’.

The GOC will send you an automated email to confirm your application. If there are any queries a GOC CET approver will contact you to ask for clarification or additional information. Otherwise you will receive an approval notification in approximately 10 working days.

Session preparation

Once your group is approved, you need to decide which case records will be discussed. If you are running a peer discussion session you can select from the ABDO cases linked to the learning objectives in your GOC submission. If you’re running a peer review, then you can ask the group to submit a record each to you in advance so you can prepare them for the discussion and ensure they fit with your chosen learning objectives.

All the people taking part in the discussion will need to be able to have a copy of the record they can keep and take away, as well as the facility to make notes about the record during the discussion. It is very important to make sure your discussion colleagues fully anonymise any records they are supplying to you, and check this before you distribute copies. Study the records to make sure they will stimulate discussion and linked to your session learning objectives.

On the day

Take a register of all the people who attend your discussion group, you will need to note names and GOC numbers. Remember, the GOC requirements for this type of CET are that there must be a minimum of 4 participants, and the rule of ‘peers’ applies to contact lens opticians and optometrists.

During the discussion encourage all members of the group to make a contribution but ensure that no-one dominates. You aim for your discussion to last around 2 hours and work through 2-4 cases per hour though this will depend on the number of people in your group and the case lengths.

Following your event on My CET

Once your event is over you will need to complete the session on the GOC website. The day after the event the site will allow you to ‘Make a declaration’. This is where you confirm if your session took place and supply evidence of your discussion. Following this you can move on to up load attendee information.
Go to ‘My CET’ and click on ‘Peer review’. You will see your session listed. Click on ‘View my CET’ and the summary page with appear. Scroll down to the ‘Make Declaration’ button.

Before you can enter attendance date you must make a declaration that the CET was delivered as was promised.

The best evidence is a copy of the case records discussed, as a scan in jpg or pdf format. If some handwritten discussion notes are included in the scan this also is helpful. Make the declaration, add the files, press ‘start’ then ‘Submit’ when they appear on the list. The attendance upload section will then become available.

Complete the attendance list and again click ‘Submit’. If all are accepted, the attendance list will be displayed.

Now, when you choose to ‘View my CET’ you will see that you can upload more attendances, view feedback and view the attendance list.

Running more sessions

Following your first session you could choose to run a duplicate session again. The next session would have the same ‘C’ number but would be given a different EV (event) number.

If you want to run another session but concentrate your discussion on different topics you will need to apply again to the GOC with new learning objectives.